Horror rarely feels this claustrophobic and this open-ended at the same time. It Ends, which reached theaters on August 21, 2026, follows four young people trapped on an endless stretch of road — and director Alex Ullom has now pulled back the curtain on what it all means, plus the surprising place he wants to take it next.
The film leans hard into the idea of liminal spaces — those in-between, dreamlike environments that feel both familiar and deeply wrong. It’s a fittingly online aesthetic, and Ullom frames the movie squarely as Gen Z horror: less about a monster in the dark, more about the dread of being stuck between one stage of life and the next, unsure whether the road ahead ever actually leads anywhere.
Behind the scenes, the version audiences saw wasn’t always the plan. Ullom revealed he originally assembled a three-hour cut of the film — an ambitious, sprawling take he ultimately had to scrap. Trimming a horror movie down from that runtime is brutal surgery, and it says a lot about the discipline of the final release that so much footage never made it out of the edit bay.
Then there’s the sequel — and it’s not what you’d expect from a movie with ‘ends’ in the title. Ullom wants to call it It Begins, and rather than escalating the scares, he’s picturing something closer to a Before Sunrise-type film. The idea: reunite with the same four characters years down the line, when they’ve grown up and hit 40, and see who they’ve become on the other side of that endless road.
It’s a genuinely unusual pitch. Horror sequels almost always chase bigger stakes, more kills, more lore. Instead, Ullom is floating a quiet, conversation-driven follow-up that treats the original’s characters as people worth revisiting rather than victims to reset. Swapping a slasher’s momentum for a talky, time-jumping character piece is a bold left turn — the kind of swing that either becomes a cult favorite or bewilders the fanbase that showed up for the scares.
Whether It Begins ever gets made is another question entirely; right now it lives in the realm of a director’s stated ambition rather than a greenlit project. But as a statement of intent, it reframes It Ends from a one-off exercise in atmospheric dread into the first chapter of something more human. For a film built around the anxiety of not knowing what comes next, that’s a fitting note to leave on.
